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Why did small business owner and gamer dad Mike Hoye spend the last few weeks hand-tweaking the text in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker so that the main character was referred to as a girl instead of a boy? As he put it, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”

Hoye and his three-and-a-half year old daughter Maya have recently been playing Wind Waker together, but Hoye was bothered by the fact that even players who change the protagonist's name to something other than "Link"—which the game allows—always get addressed as though they are male. The main character is always referred to with words like “master,” “my lad,” and “swordsman.” Because Hoye's daughter can't yet read, Hoye has been reading the on-screen dialogue aloud to her and diligently transliterating the gendered language from male to female on the fly as they traverse the game's Great Sea together.

To make this process smoother, Hoye eventually decided to hack away at the actual text of the story, producing a female-oriented version by altering the game's data files. According to his blog post on the project, Hoye took a GameCube disk image (.GCM) of Wind Waker and dug into it with a hex editor. He changed all story text and dialogue by hand, then tested his work by playing the game file in the Dolphin GameCube emulator.

The modifications proved a bit tricky, since the new female-oriented wording had to be a byte-for-byte alteration of the original; even throwing in "she" in place of "he" would mess things up. So Hoye got creative, using words like “milady” in place of “my lad” and “master."

“Sentences need to be changed or reworded just because 'young lady' is one character longer than 'young man,' line breaks need to be in about the right places, that sort of thing,” Hoye told Ars via e-mail.

The gendered storyline that Nintendo gave Wind Waker wasn’t inappropriate; Link is, and always has been, a boy. But if parents want to introduce their daughter to video games, there’s a noticeable shortage of good female main characters to round out the experiences, stories, and situations that unfold. Furthermore, no one should have to deny their daughters a healthy education in the wonders of Zelda because male-oriented text might deal a blow to girls' sense of self-worth.

Would playing Wind Waker as a male protagonist really cause problems for Hoye's daughter? Hoye doesn't know and says he "probably can’t know. I did this because playing through Wind Waker is something my daughter and I like doing together, and because I think Maya deserves to have the game address her as herself. She's not an NPC, and Dad's favorite pastime shouldn't treat girls like second-class citizens.”

Not that such changes are simple. Hoye told Ars that the changes took about “two or three solid days of work, an hour or two at a time over the last few weeks.”

Hoye has made the changes available as a patch to the Wind Waker .GCM file, which must be applied using a tool called "xdelta3," he writes. The modified game needs to be played within the Dolphin emulator, but Hoye speculated to us that it might be possible to burn the game back onto a disc such that it would be compatible with the console again. In any event, Hoye now has a female protagonist for Wind Waker—and you can see the results of his work above.

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As a male, for the longest time I never but much consideration into these things. When I had my first child, for a while we thought it was going to be a girl (Turned out to be a boy). During that time I started looking at my hobbies and ways to encorperate a girl into them and found how much is overlooked for young girls.

There are almost no female superheroes sutible for a small girl, and of the few there are, there is NO merchandise for. Unless she wants to be a princess there aren't many videogame options for a young girl either.

This is one of those things that once I've seen, I can't unsee it. I notice this gap in almost everything my son gets interested in, and it really bothers me. We own dozens of little superhero squad/ DC universe playschool figures and the only woman I can even find to buy is Catwoman.

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

390 Reader Comments

At the social game company I work at I fought hard to insist the main character not be called 'King' and would instead dynamically refer to you as King or Queen based on your avatar's gender. Not nearly enough dudes put any thought into this kind of thing at all. I'm basically considered a 'pest' because I think about this shit.

I have no problem with this in general, but I feel a LITTLE like this is missing the forest for the trees. It's a little more unique in more interactive settings, but... it's sort of like advocating that a movie should have the characters gender swapped as well. I haven't played wind waker, so the fact that Link is traditionally male may have 0 impact on the story, and in that case, go Dad.

First thing: He has fine taste in games. Wind Waker was the last Zelda game I really enjoyed and a lot of it had to do with the beautiful animation and art style. It really gave the characters a lot of personality.

Second thing: Very cool of this guy to do this. Link really doesn't need to be gendered as nothing in-game requires use of a penis. So good on him for helping his daughter to put herself fully into the role of the hero(ine).

I have no problem with this in general, but I feel a LITTLE like this is missing the forest for the trees. It's a little more unique in more interactive settings, but... it's sort of like advocating that a movie should have the characters gender swapped as well.

I don't think that analogy works at all, since you're actively controlling the character. It differs from person to person, but many people play even third-person games as "then I did this...", not "then I pushed a button that made Link do this..." Children especially play games as though they did those things in the game worlds, and then will immediately stand up and mime doing that exact same action in excitement.

And, of course, the original version of the game's still available; this is just an option. While I'll generally heap scorn on a bowdlerized book or movie, I think this is a different case, especially because it's intended for kids who don't particularly care about canon - they just want to have a good time.

That just means you don't know anything about child or identity development. What that girl experiences in her first years determines who she is for the rest of her life, how her mind processes inputs, how she views the world around her. Taking extra steps to make sure she develops a sense of self worth is important.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it's objectively "getting out of hand."

I like this guy! My own dad and I used to play Mario together and Donkey Kong together AND he bought MS PAC MAN JUST FOR ME! It was the 80's you couldn't fudge back then like you can now but my dad wanted an empowered nerdy daughter just like this guy so I love this story. More lady game characters please!

My children both LOVE Zelda. For Halloween my 3-year-old son dressed up as Link (as depicted in Wind Waker) but even though she plays the game herself now (as link of course) my 7-year-old daughter didn't want to be Zelda and didn't choose to be Link. She was a bat and pretended to be a "keese" in order to play together (even tossing him little hearts or rupees when she "died").

I do enjoy how Zelda herself played a MUCH bigger role in the events of Skyward Sword and I wish Zelda was ultra-popular enough as a series to get a spin-off game that allowed you to play the entire game from her perspective.

Maybe whatever the incarnation of Zelda is on the Wii U will continue the trend and make Zelda playable. Maybe a half and half game where you play both characters, or maybe even cooperative? It would be fitting to bring the namesake of the game into the game play more!

As he put it, “I’m not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don’t get to be the hero.”

As the father of a young girl, I see that society now actively teaches girls that they can be anything they want to be. Want to be a girly-girl? Fine! Want to be a tomboy! Fine! Want to start a business? Here's a loan! Want to stay home and raise the kids? You're a saint! Etc. Heck, Barbie's theme song is "I can do anything!"

Not sure that under-representation as video-game protagonists are going to have a big impact on a girl's self-esteem or life plans.

I've got to agree with those who are saying this seems a bit silly and unappreciative of the artistic integrity of the work.

I'm the biggest liberal there is, but this just seems really unnecessary.

Maybe instead of doing something so superficial he should have taken up teaching her some programming or at least how to use a code editor so she could have edited all the male pronouns into female pronouns herself if he really wanted to empower her.

Here we go again... The main character in most games is male simply because most gamers are male. It's not any sort of an attempt to slam girls or make them "2nd class." If most gamers were female guess what the main characters in most games would be?

Does he also rewrite books and pen over the gender in them too? Artistic integrity and vision of the creator? Nope. This guy is a nutcase extremest.

I would imagine books are a bit different than video games. Video games are visual and interactive, children especially submerge themselves into that world and into those characters (or at least I did).

What privilege does Casey, the writer of this article, exhibit by writing this story?

I think his actions are a good wake-up call to the effect that video games have had on children, and are having on children.

This genre of entertainment has traditionally been male-driven for whatever reason, which is very much different from books, music, and movies, which all have solid examples of both women and men in positions of power. I think the video game gender identity is still somewhat foggy - we don't have enough games that allow for both genders, especially games for kids (we wouldn't want a girl who doesn't yet know how to read go around picking up Skyrim, World of Warcraft, or Mass Effect).

While there are a decent handful of good female characters out there, they're still relatively rare and it's a shame that out of Nintendo's entire lineup of first-party characters, the only really strong, stand-out female is Samus, and even she is something of a tomboy that doesn't quite exhibit a good "You can be a strong, confident girl without acting like a boy" vibe.

Video game characters in this day and age are becoming role models to kids just as much as rock stars and movie stars are. I bet that even many of the people who are reading Ars now had some kind of video game character they admired for various reasons. It will be nice to think that future generations will continue to have characters they can relate to and admire that come from all kinds of diverse backgrounds, orientations, genders, and races.

I have no problem with this in general, but I feel a LITTLE like this is missing the forest for the trees. It's a little more unique in more interactive settings, but... it's sort of like advocating that a movie should have the characters gender swapped as well. I haven't played wind waker, so the fact that Link is traditionally male may have 0 impact on the story, and in that case, go Dad.

It isn't like advocating that at all. Movies are passive; games are not. The on-screen character is a proxy for the player, especially in a game such as this, where the character is, in a limited way, customizable. The sex of the on-screen character is important; that character's characteristics influence how we present ourselves within the game. Giving players the ability to control the character's sex--at least when the sex is irrelevant to the gameplay, as it is in this case--is important.

I didn't really realize the extent of how male centric the world was until I had daughters. What this dad did isn't "outta hand", it's just a small bit to help his still formative daughter not feel like the world is tilted a little against her.

Loving father hacks the game and makes it more directly relatable to his young daughter.

People raise flags for "gender obsession" and "missing the point"? Seriously?

It does miss the point, but in a sweet devoted to your precocious young crotch-dropping sort of way.

People read books all the time where the main character isn't the same gender that they are, and it's part of the experience that the author intended. Without getting into a debate about who "owns" the text (author vs audience), I don't think that it was necessarily a cynical patriarchal decision designed to keep women down when J.K. Rowling decided that Harry Potter should be a male.

As a male, for the longest time I never but much consideration into these things. When I had my first child, for a while we thought it was going to be a girl (Turned out to be a boy). During that time I started looking at my hobbies and ways to encorperate a girl into them and found how much is overlooked for young girls.

There are almost no female superheroes sutible for a small girl, and of the few there are, there is NO merchandise for. Unless she wants to be a princess there aren't many videogame options for a young girl either.

This is one of those things that once I've seen, I can't unsee it. I notice this gap in almost everything my son gets interested in, and it really bothers me. We own dozens of little superhero squad/ DC universe playschool figures and the only woman I can even find to buy is Catwoman.

Does he also rewrite books and pen over the gender in them too? Artistic integrity and vision of the creator?

I'm sympathetic to this reasoning, but with games, it's a little muddier because the intent is usually to allow the user to "become" the character. I could see where it's harder to identify with and immerse yourself in a character of a different gender.